About This Site
This is not a portfolio site.
In November 2005, I returned to painting after a gap of many years. It became immediately apparent to me that I was desperately out of practice and needed to retrain. This site is a record, in pictures and words, of the ongoing process of that retraining.
I started this site almost as soon as I'd decided to return to painting. It seemed the natural thing to do since I'd been working in web development for a few years, which made it pretty easy to build it and keep it running. I had some vague notion that it might be useful as a marketing tool at some point in the future, when I was ready to go full time as a painter.
Over time, the site has grown into a documentation of my learning process and the focus has changed and also become clearer. To my constant surprise, it appears that some people out there doing a similar thing to me (and there are a lot of us these days) have found something interesting in my ramblings. The site has become a way to make connections, to share the struggle - and it is a struggle - and also to share information and techniques.
Learning representational drawing and painting is hard, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Personal circumstances (age and having a mortgage to pay) and the current scarcity of decent art training have made it necessary for me to become an autodidact. I'm teaching myself.
Many times I've questioned whether it's possible to teach yourself to paint well. Whilst some might argue that all painters are essentially self-taught, there's no doubt that I've made many mistakes and gone down more than a few dead ends. But there are advantages to teaching yourself too.
I've been obliged to give this question a lot of thought. I've come to the conclusion that despite the difficulties, the autodidact's road has one big advantage. Everything must be questioned and constantly reassessed. Nothing can be taken for granted, any new idea or technique must be approached with an open mind and tested thoroughly. Independence of thought becomes a necessity, a habit.
Cultivating this kind of habitual independence leads, I believe, to continued progress. Life is constantly changing around us, we are constantly changing and adapting to it. Species that don't adapt to changes in their environments die out. I don't believe that there ever comes a point where, as painters, we can say that we've arrived, that this is 'good enough'. Although we seem to have a strong desire for a comfortable kind of permanence, and for plan that we can follow supplied by some authoritative source, in the end I think these things lead to stagnation, our worst enemy.
If there's a message contained anywhere here, I hope that it's this: That we can teach ourselves to draw and paint, and that the most useful tool in our toolbox is an open and questioning mind.